"Very few modern people would bother to write down such trifles."

The diary is not a lost art, as various recently published diaries of soldiers and Civil Defence workers go to show. But it seems unlikely that now have, in England, any diarists of quite the type of Lord Shaftesbury, or Dorothy Wordsworth, or Mary Shelley, or various others who are gathered together in this recent Pelican. Take, for instance, this typical extract from the diary of Hurrell Froude, one of the leading spirits in the early days of the Oxford Movement:

“November 12, 1826: Felt ashamed that my trousers were dirty while sitting next to . . . but resolved not to hide them. This sort of shame about what we ourselves esteem matters of indifference, because they do not seem so to other people, bring home to our minds what depravity it proves in us to pay so little attention to what we know is serious.”

Or this typical one from William Charles Macready, the famous actor-manager:

“January 22, 1833: Not altogether dissatisfied with the labour of to-day, though I might have done my duty better by rising earlier. my walk to London was real enjoyment from the beauty of the day: my thoughts, too, were not idle, for I went through several scenes of ‘Othello’. Taking into consideration the employment of my time in the study of that character, the benefit of the air and exercise, and the money saved in my walk, I cannot set down the three hours and a half it cost me as misused or laid out to waste.”

Very few modern people would bother to write down such trifles. A battle or a blitz may seem worth recording, but we are probably less interested in the tiny details of our behaviour than were the Victorians. At any rate, our consciences weigh less heavily upon us, our sense of the sinfulness of pleasure is less acute. Froude, for instance, seems to have felt himself in danger of damnation every time he enjoyed his dinner. But it was exactly this hypertrophied moral sense that turned so many nineteenth-century English men and women into industrious diarists. Nearly every action seemed to them significant. And though they recorded many absurdities they also added valuable footnotes to history and sometimes made dramatic stories out of what, by modern standards, would seem very uneventful lives […]

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